“It’s
ridiculous,” I added. “There’s no onus to work! Nothing to stop everyone from being burdos. From
spending more than they have year after year. In fact, there’s nothing to stop
a person from simply refusing to work at all, yet still spending like a
millionaire!”
“Almost
nothing, beyond the approval of others.”
“Is that
all?” I scathed.
“It’s
enough. Especially with final account balances displayed on gravestones and
memorial plaques. People decide their own epitaph. And most are motivated to
avoid anything unflattering. Nevertheless, your concerns are well-founded.
There are a few burdos, the most
troublesome difficult enough for any system. But there are more workos. Indeed,
as soon as the working week was reduced, many volunteered unpaid hours. Some
like to keep busy. And some actually find work enjoyable and satisfying.”
“Then why
not avoid saving work in the first place? Keep longer hours!”
Wilbur
tried to reply, but each attempt was thwarted by hiccups of imperfectly
suppressed amusement. Finally, he managed: “Perfectly ludicrous.” Then he saw
my expression. “That wasn’t a joke?!”
“Of course
not. The fear of unemployment couldn’t have been that easy to shed!?”
“There is
no unemployment when people share
work. Even when a job becomes redundant or unnecessary, its occupant is paid
for the start of the next period as if they’re doing that work, while actually
spending the time retraining for other necessary work. Of course, those costs
are taken into account before the annual resetting of prices. As are payments
to the disabled, the retired, anyone genuinely unable to work—they each receive
credits of half the average income.”
I shook my
head in disbelief. It was all too much to assimilate, let alone frame an
intelligent response. “Generous,” I muttered.
“Fair and
reasonable. Only those able to contribute but who deliberately and consistently
choose not to, receive no payments. But their accounts reflect their choice. If
they persist long enough, however, in some regions at least, their voting
privileges can be suspended and their housing choices restricted.”
“This…,” I
began, overwhelmed. “This all works?!”
“It
certainly has worked. With the
ability to remove unnecessary work, and to share what needs to be done,
productivity has skyrocketed. Within a decade, most of the truly necessary work
was done by half the previous number of people in half the time.”
“But the
numbers are so rubbery. So manipulated. They just don’t seem real to me.”
“They are rubbery and manipulated, but they’re
also as real as people want them to be. The figures on stock markets were also
rubbery—little more than figments of hyperactive imaginations—yet people once
chose to treat them as real. Numbers now in use may seem every bit as
arbitrary, but they’re not just plucked from thin air. A lot of effort has gone
into setting prices of goods, and the
wages paid to produce them, so they better reflect community values and take
into account all social and environmental costs. The extremes of your time—poverty-line
wages and multi-million dollar executive salaries for example—simply no longer
exist. Rubbery perhaps, but current wages and prices are more meaningful and
fairer than any determined by profit-obsessed markets.”
“It must be
so much work to process all the information. I can’t imagine how it could be
attempted.”
“Quite
easily. In essence it’s little different in scope to the old Gross Domestic
Product estimates, but facilitated by a streamlined participatory form of
democracy that makes considerable use of the Net.”
“How
exactly?”
“I think
you may have enough to digest for the moment. Besides, I have other things I
need to go on with. I’ll return tomorrow morning.”
After
Wilbur left, I found myself at a loose end. His lecture had overwhelmed me to
the point that I just wanted to leave the subject alone, for a while at least.
I
distractedly paced about the house, until I noticed the computer screen still
adhered to the kitchen wall. Reminded of the Citizens’ Database, a sudden
curiosity burned. I re-started the browser and found the website with little
fuss. What would it have to say about events since 2030? What sort of life had
my kids made for themselves? I entered Godfred’s details, but with my finger
hovering over the ‘Enter’ key, I hesitated.
I’d been
treating it all as something of a game, but what if I was wrong? What if this
was not a dream? What if I found a
way to return to my own time after learning about my children’s futures? If
Godfred or Sylvia were going to win fame and fortune, for example, would my
pleasure seeing them attain it be reduced by knowing it all along? Was it the
trip and not the destination that mattered after all? Or what if I knew of some
dreadful event—would I spend all the years beforehand trapped in fear and
anticipation? Or would I try to take steps to avoid the woes, but perhaps
ultimately only cause them? The sci-fi I was familiar with was full of these
sorts of paradoxes, and while there was no clear consensus as to what was
possible or likely, that in itself seemed a convincing reason to avoid the
dilemma.
“But it is just a dream,” I tried to convince
myself. “It’s not like I’d be learning anything real.”
I did not convince myself. Indeed, I belatedly
realised that for all I’d learnt during this dream, the vast majority of it was
general—the way society conducted itself, its approaches and systems—not
anything specific about people, at least not any I knew in my own time, nor
about historical events. Call me a coward, but I decided it would be prudent to
maintain that habit. I hit the ‘Escape’ key, and exited the browser.
By that
stage, it was late afternoon. With a sound like the final tortured moments of a
draining bath, my stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I helped
myself to the contents of Ernest’s refrigerator and prepared myself a simple
meal. I deliberately took it slowly, yet still my mind was elsewhere, going
over my situation, its various interpretations and implications.
My mantra
persisted, but more desperately, less convincingly. It had to be a dream.
“What I
need now,” I eventually decided, after eating and cleaning up, “is a good
distraction.” I needed to settle down as I usually did, by losing myself in a
good book. Or better, a good film. I picked up the TV remote and stumbled
around with the controls until, a few frustrated attempts later, I managed to
get the screen on and to list Ernest’s video collection. I scanned the titles,
hoping for something suitably escapist. Most titles looked unfamiliar—just what
my dream should be arranging, if there was supposed to be forty years of films
I hadn’t seen. But I soon saw one title that I did recognise: ‘First Contact’.
The ‘Star Trek’ film, apparently still popular not much less than a century
after it was released.
Why not, I thought. Something tried and proven. Haven’t seen it in years… Perhaps decades!
I used the
remote to select the title, and a menu appeared, typical for a DVD film, but
with a backdrop that bore no resemblance to any ‘Star Trek’ film I’d seen:
there were several images, the main one causing me such sudden shock that I
dropped the remote to the floor and began to quiver.
“What
the…,” I mumbled, hurriedly turning my attention away from the screen to the wall,
the floor, outside the window, anywhere but the screen. My breathing sped up,
and I had to make a conscious effort to calm down.
Nervously,
hesitantly, I picked up the remote, and dared to look at the TV screen again.
The backdrop images were of an unfamiliar ringed planet, the earth from space,
and a strange spacecraft from which exited several humanoids depicted on too
small a scale for me to discern any detail. But there was no doubt about the
foreground figure: the head of a humanoid yet non-human creature, identical to
the one who had found me along the bush road.
A demon.
I again
dropped the remote—it landed on its corner on the instep of my injured bare
foot, mere centimetres from the bruise. I repressed a cry of pain and
reflexively lifted my leg to inspect the thin red scratch forming where the
remote had landed. “At this rate,” I muttered, “I’ll be an amputee before I get
home.” But the new pain faded quickly and there was no obvious damage other
than the scratch. Still, I hung onto my foot, delaying my next step (sic).
Finally, I
summoned the resolve to face the screen again. A closer look at the demon’s
face revealed subtle differences from the traditional image. Yes, it was scaly
and had two horns on its forehead, but they were small, little more than bumps.
He—or perhaps she—also had normal rounded, not spiked, ears, and the skin was
not green or red or black but only slightly darker than a typical Caucasian’s.
It was the nose that differed most: narrower than normal, it extended from the
usual spot above the mouth to finish protruding above the eyes, and was almost as wide there as at the lower
extreme. The eyes themselves were dark red, almost black, and like a cat’s,
without any white around the irises. There was also no evil-looking goatee
beard, indeed no facial hair at all, including on the scalp. Though I hadn’t
consciously noticed these subtleties when the lightning flash gave me my brief
glimpse of the demon by the road, I had no doubt it was the same creature.
When I was
able to tear my attention away from the face, I noticed words under the screen
title: ‘The true story of humanity’s first visitors from the stars’.
“An
alien!?” I gasped. “I really have read too much sci-fi.”
But my
curiosity quickly took hold—I selected ‘play movie’, and started watching it.
Over a
panorama of stars and galaxies, a voice full of gravity quietly intoned: “February
2, 2042. A pivotal date for humanity. Before, we had wondered. After, we were
certain. We are not alone. Other
life, other intelligences do inhabit
other planets. And one had decided to pay us a visit.”
A close
still shot of a demon-face. “At first,” continued the narrator, “our visitors
invoked fear. Distrust. Panic… Yet that did not last.”
Cut to a
long shot of people walking in great numbers along the street of a busy
shopping area. “Now, their presence among us is taken for granted. We have
become accustomed to them.” This confused me, for try as I might, I could not
see any demon faces among the throng. The narrator continued. “Indeed, most of
us would not even notice them were it not for their identifying bracelets.”
The TV
screen cut to a close shot of a human arm adorned at the wrist with a
prominent, unusual and very ornate gold-coloured bracelet.
The same
bracelet that Wilbur wore.
I jumped in
my seat. “What the— ?!” I could feel my heartbeat racing, matched by my mind as
it tried to grapple with this new information, to fit it into recent events, to
try to work out why Wilbur wore a bracelet reputedly meant to identify an
alien. Wilbur was clearly no demon, even if his sense of humour was hellish.
What the devil was going on?
“How is
it,” continued the narrator, “that the long-anticipated first contact with
aliens from other worlds so quickly gave way to blithe disregard?” Cut to a
similar shot of the spacecraft from the backdrop, with disembarking aliens.
“This is the story of that first contact, how it was greeted, and the changes
it wrought for humanity.”
At this
point, my inner confusion prompted me to rewind and pause, to have a closer
look at the wrist bracelet—which made me even more certain it was the same as
Wilbur’s. What, indeed, was going on?
I was too
distracted and fretful to continue watching the documentary, so I paused it.
But I desperately needed an outlet for my nervous energy, so I paced back and
forth, as fast as my bruised toes would allow, trying to assimilate the new
information, trying to think what it all might mean.
I gave up
quickly, too impatient for an answer. I rummaged in the bedroom through the
shoe collection until I found a pair of open-toed sandals (garishly green), put
them on gingerly without buckling the one on my damaged foot (the pointy-toed
shoes I wore earlier that day were not an option), and hobbled out the front
door.
The sun had
all but set when I reached Wilbur’s house. The morning storms had long gone and
left a perfectly clear sky. Opposite the sun, low in the sky, was the moon, not
far from full. It only heightened my discomfort when I remembered the moon as I
last saw it, earlier on the night this convoluted dream began: a barely visible
crescent scraping the horizon soon after sunset. Two days in Jibilee and a
crescent moon had turned nearly full! I had
to be dreaming.
Wilbur took
some time to answer my knock, during which I noticed his carport was empty but
his car was parked in front of the house. Odd,
I thought, before he opened his front door. I immediately decided to go for
broke, and spoke before he could even say hello. “You never told me about the aliens!”
For a
moment, I thought his poker face quailed, but if so, he recovered too quickly
for me to be sure. “The subject never came up,” he said, gesturing me inside.
I entered
the house, fuming at his answer. “You could have told me anyway! It’s a fairly
major event.”
“We had so
many other matters to deal with, I just never gave it priority.” He led me to
the lounge. “You just found out, I take it.”
“Yes, from
one of Ernest’s videos.” He sat on a couch but I remained standing. And fuming.
“But I don’t understand why you wear the same wrist bracelet as the aliens.”
He was
clearly surprised. “You don’t?”
“No! You’re not an alien!”
“Well, yes,
I am. Surely you—”
“Come off
it Wilbur. If you’re an alien, what the hell happened to your face? Plastic
surgery?”
Wilbur
sighed and shrugged. Then, before my incredulous eyes, his face seemed to melt,
then re-coalesce into that of a demon-alien.
I backed
away, breathless and alarmed, my eyes fixed on his face. “What the— !?”
“I told
you,” he said, quietly, his voice deeper than normal, but with the same unusual
accent.
“You didn’t
tell me you could… could do that,” I said, waving vaguely at his face.
“Surely the
vid mentioned my species is metamorphic?”
“Metamorphic?!”
I parroted. “I only watched the first minute or so. When they mentioned your
bracelet, I rushed over here for an explanation.”
“Well, I
guess now you have it.”
For a
while, I was lost for words—too many questions battled for priority. Wilbur
must have misinterpreted, because his features melted again, back into his
usual familiar face, and he said, “I’m sorry if my true appearance makes you
uncomfortable.” His voice had regained its usual pitch. “Most humans are
affected the same way. That’s why my species now adopt native forms when we
visit your planet.”
“Native
forms!?” I grunted, before wondering if I should start enquiring about bird
cage hire rates. Desperate to fill in the looming silence, I soon added,
“Anyone I know?”
“Sort of.
Wilbur Edmonds.”
My surprise
mounted.
“The doctor
who usually lives here,” continued Wilbur—the alien Wilbur anyway. “He’s now
about halfway through his world trip.”
“You’ve
been masquerading as him?”
“Hardly a
masquerade, but yes, that’s the arrangement.” He held up his hand, displaying
the bracelet. “There’s no deception as long as I wear this. It announces to
everyone that I’m not the person I look like.”
“But why
look like someone who’s known?” I was starting to calm down, enough to decide
to sit—as far from Wilbur as the positions of the couches allowed.
“Convenience.
Since Doctor Edmonds was not going to be living here for a year, his house was
made available to me. I might as well look like him as anyone else. The local
community certainly never objected to the idea. Indeed, the people of Jibilee
have been very accepting. They’ve made me feel very much at home. I shall miss
many of them when I return to Orlanos.”
“Your
planet?”
He nodded.
“So you
aren’t even a doctor?”
“No.”
“What do I
call you? Wilbur isn’t your real name, right?”
“No, it
isn’t, but it’s what everyone here calls me.”
I was too
curious to let it rest. “What is your
real name?”
“You’d be
unable to pronounce it.”
“Try me.”
Wilbur made
a few sibilant whistling noises punctuated by odd rolling consonants, with
something in the middle resembling an anaemic raspberry, all of which amounted
to a few syllables—but they were truly impossible for me to repeat.
“Why didn’t
you tell me any of this before?”
“To avoid
you becoming even more disoriented than you already were.”
Reasonable, I thought. And reassuring. “So I really did
see a demon? It was you.”
“Exactly.
And you fainted at once. Very flattering in retrospect.” He smiled grimly.
“But why
were you in your natural shape then? Why not like you are now?”
“A lapse on
my part. I adopt my natural shape on Earth usually only when alone, as I was in
the car when I found you. I simply forgot to revert to this appearance.”
“So, what
really happened after I fainted?”
“You hit
your head on a rock. So I took the precaution of asking Toby to examine you.
Though you stayed unconscious the whole time, he thought the bump fairly minor,
and advised just to keep an eye on you until you woke.”
“But why
did you pretend to be a doctor?”
“Actually,
I didn’t. I neither confirmed nor denied it when you falsely deduced it. Since
you were so disoriented, so amnesiac, I thought it best not to nit-pick. There
were more important memories to try to ignite, without overwhelming you with
minor details.”
“If you
wanted to re-ignite lost memories, why did you hide your identity? Wouldn’t
revealing it have helped me remember? If
I was Ernest, that is.”
“It should
have. And it was my intention, initially. But when you recounted your memories,
you didn’t mention seeing me as a ‘demon’, as you put it, when I found you by
the roadside. I thought that a curious omission to say the least. No doubt my
understanding of human psychology is less than perfect, but you seemed
particularly uncomfortable and unsure about me, at least in my true form, so
much so that either you felt obliged to lie about it or perhaps to force it
from your memory. Either way, best not to bring it to your attention, I thought—it
could have tipped your fragile state of mind further out of balance. Better
instead to keep secret my true identity, at least until you were better able to
handle such a revelation. That’s why I improvised the story about finding you
on the doorstep. I rather regret the deception now. It would have been simpler
to say you were found by the side of the road—but the thought came to me
suddenly and I rather unwisely went with it. Perhaps I have read too many Earth
fairy stories.”
“I believed
you at the time,” I said, smiling grimly. “I thought the demon must have dumped
me on your doorstep. Assuming I hadn’t dreamed him.”
“A dream
within a dream?”
I nodded.
“Hell! I didn’t have a clue what was going on at first. I’m not sure I do now.”
After all, here I was in a perfectly ordinary room, having a quiet conversation
with an alien!
Suddenly
Wilbur yawned. “I’m sorry, Steven. Any other questions will have to wait. I
really have to get some sleep. Maintaining a form other than my natural one
takes a toll on me. Especially with your planet’s stronger gravity.”
“Er, sure,”
I said, feeling suddenly intrusive. “Sorry.”
I returned
to Ernest’s home and immediately watched ‘First Contact’ in full. It was
informative and well put together, if occasionally pompous in tone.
Naturally
it dwelt at some length on the shape-shifting abilities of the ‘Orlanis’. They
were not, however, the typical sci-fi metamorph made of a fluid substance that
could mould itself into the shape of anything from a flea to a skyscraper.
Rather they were more like normal earthly creatures, with internal organs and a
specific structure, but possessing very unearthly levels of bodily control (to
the molecular level) not just over their exterior appearance but also their
muscles, internal organs, even their unusually flexible skeletons. Exercising
that control allowed them to reshape themselves markedly, to stretch and shrink
and distort, even to warp the skin of their scalp into the semblance of hair.
What squids do with colours, Orlanis could do with substance. But there were
limits, from beyond which their true bodily parts could not recover. And they
could not shed or gain mass in the process. So they could not turn into a
full-sized elephant—or even a scaled down version, due to the extent of such a
deformation.
Another
surprising revelation was that while Orlanis were highly intelligent and
adaptive creatures, with particular skill at quickly picking up alien
languages, they found the human concept of humour baffling. Apparently, there
was no such thing on their home planet. Not surprising then that they could
rarely tell, let alone invent, a joke that humans found funny. Their failure,
however, only fanned their desire to succeed—one trait at least which they
shared with us.
Wilbur’s
‘jokes’ now took on new meaning. It was more fundamental than him simply having
a poor sense of humour, as I had thought. As long as he tried to force it to
happen, however, it would probably never come to him and he would continue to
seem awkward.
Orlanis had
similar problems with proverbs, according to the documentary, despite their
language skills. Usually finding them obscure and alien (sic), they tended to be
misunderstood as well as mis-remembered. Again, I saw Wilbur in a new light.
The
ultimate cause of all these differences, it was said, was the Orlanis’
different brain structure—the cause also of their more developed visual sense,
which allowed them, among other things, to discern subtle mood shifts via slight
changes to skin colour and complexion. This ability more than anything else
enabled them to know (usually) when to react to human jokes, even though the
joke almost inevitably soared over the tops of their metamorphic heads.
They had
several other comparative advantages over humans, especially as regards
mathematics and, to my surprise, singing (they could alter their larynx, at
will, to generate almost any sound imaginable—a veritable orchestra in a
voice-box).
There were
reportedly several thousand Orlanis on Earth, studying human behaviour first-hand
while teaching us about themselves and some of their more advanced technology
and knowledge. In something like a cultural exchange program, a smaller number
of humans had been transported to Orlanos for similar purposes.
Oddly
enough, I was most taken aback by the claim that Orlanis used a similar
economic and political system as that in force on Earth in 2070, but after
operating it for more than a century, they had done away with money entirely.
This followed, it was said, because the Orlanis had reduced their working week
to so small a duration—barely an hour—that the book-keeping required to balance
costs and prices became counter-productive, more work than it was worth. It was
simpler and, in the words of the film, “more enlightened” to simply do an
hour’s work each week for no monetary reward. No longer needing to pay for
anything they wanted, the Orlanis were apparently both wealthy and cohesive
enough to curb any inclination to indulge to excess.
I was
surprised at first by their willingness to accept such self-imposed limits, but
then realised how it was simply an extension to the habits adopted and
encouraged by a system long in place—it would have been more surprising for
them to have abandoned those habits and reverted to practices not seen for more
than a century.
While
watching this part of the film, I wondered if first contact with Orlanis might
have sparked the change on earth, that we might have adopted their systems. But the film soon
informed me this was not the case: enufism, as it was called, had been
implemented shortly before first contact was made. We had no saviours from
above, only from within. Even so, I could not help but think that the proven
fact of another intelligent life form in the universe must have humbled and
ultimately united humanity, and so helped ease the transition to a new system.
When the
film finished, I felt restless again, which prompted my usual response: to surf
the web. It hadn’t changed much: it was still full of diversions and crackpot
ideas, playful home and personal sites, and a plethora of social and business pages.
It did lack many of the sites I knew, yet it had others that more than made up
for it. As did its most prominent difference: there was no advertising.
While sampling
some of Ernest’s bookmarked sites, I discovered one which claimed to have
“almost any music ever recorded, any film ever made, any book ever written”—all
available for completely legal free downloading.
I felt
compelled to research that claim, and soon found an explanation. Allegedly,
there were still platinum albums, hit films, and million-seller novels, which
still made their creators famous—but not
rich. Fame followed in large proportion to how often an artist’s work was
downloaded, but also to how much it was appreciated. Soon after a book, film,
song or album arrived on a Babel or computer, an electronic request to rate the
product out of ten would follow. The ratings so provided—optional and able to
be amended later if desired—were used to distinguish ‘successful’ artists from
the rest. Those with high enough ratings were then funded by CAPE to continue
full-time in their chosen fields, less highly rated others received part-time
funding, the rest were left to pursue their muse in their spare time. The
dividing lines were determined mostly by what could be absorbed by CAPE without
a detrimental effect to working hours or prices. Even so, success as so defined
often proved fleeting, with one-hit wonders reportedly quite common.
It left me
wondering: if such an approach had been in place in my mid-teens, the garage
band I toyed with might have lasted a lot longer, and my life might have turned
out quite differently.
A more
definite consequence of the arrangement, however, was that hard-copy books had
become rare, except in libraries. Apart from a few devoted bookworms and
academics, almost no one was willing to pay for the more costly option of
keeping their collections as actual books rather than computer files. Ernest’s
spilling bookshelves clearly made him one of the exceptions.
I had to
admit all of this must have avoided a lot of waste. Probably three quarters or
more of my own collections had been read or viewed once, or played only a few
times, then ignored or forgotten, and were now useful only as dust-collectors
or coasters. I’d even once used a book (an ancient and unappreciated gift) as emergency
fire-fodder.
As it
turned out, I could have easily spent many more hours surfing the web and undoubtedly
found much more information of interest. However, I was prevented from doing
so…
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Part 4![]() |